The present invention relates to an apparatus for the automatic production of stators for electric motors.
There are known installations permitting the fully or semi-automatic production of stators for example by means of automatic winding machines comprising a rotating table which defines a series of circumferentially spaced operating stations. These known installations make possible the winding of wires to a stator; the application of wire ends to the joining pieces; the joining of those ends to the pieces by welding or soldering, and electrical testing of the wires.
A substantial disadvantage of the known rotating table systems involves a limited expandability of the table for accessory devices due to the fixed circumferential dimension of the table. Also, even though a particular operation at a particular station may be completed, the table cannot be advanced until the operations at all stations have been completed. Thus, the overall process is inefficient from a time standpoint.
It is, therefore, an object of this invention to minimize or obviate problems of the types described above.
Another object is to provide methods and apparatus for the production of stators in which an infinite number of work stations can be provided.
A further object is to enable stators to be advanced to a subsequent work station before the operations being performed on stators at other stations have been completed.
It is an object of the invention to provide a workpiece holder for the fully automatic production of stators with an arbitrary number of processing stations, wherein the individual processing stations may have a configuration similar to that of commonly assigned, copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 568,071 filed Jan. 4, 1984, now U.S. Pat. No. 4,553,321 issued Nov. 19, 1985, which is hereby incorporated by reference.